Pete Wentz: Playboy Interview

“To some,” a magazine recently declared, he “is the Antichrist; to others, he’s a savior.”

Who is this controversial and divisive figure? A politician—Kim Jong Il or Hugo Chavez? Could it be Charles Manson? Maybe L. Ron Hubbard? Rupert Murdoch? No, the polarizing potentate is the bassist and lyricist of the rock band Fall Out Boy.

Actually, that’s an inadequate description. Pete Wentz’s mightiest instrument is the Internet, and his true job is provocateur. Black-haired and five-foot-seven, usually photographed wearing eyeliner, he is the first web 2.0 rock star: A constant presence online, he has created an interactive relationship with fans enthralled by word-mad songs that sob or elate and comment constantly on their own emotionalism. Self-portraits of Wentz naked with cock in hand dominated the Internet in March 2006 and generated suspicion that he had issued them himself to create buzz. Wentz, 29, even met his wife, 24-year-old pop starlet Ashlee Simpson, via e-mail.

Androgyny has always inflamed fans’ hormones (“I’m pretty much half gay,” Wentz once said), but eyeliner alone isn’t the basis of Wentz’s stature. Fall Out Boy’s style of music, emo, has surged into the mainstream in the past several years because an entire generation hears its own experiences described in the genre’s diaristic lyrics about tortured romances and crippling self-doubt, and it prizes these scars like priceless jewels. Emo bands don’t merely wear their heart on their sleeve—they lift up their sleeve to show the bloody wounds underneath.

The oldest of three kids, Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, a prosperous Chicago suburb. He seems to have had a typical suburban childhood: He was a talented soccer player, lost his driver’s license for repeatedly speeding and enrolled at DePaul University while living at home. Like most suburban tales, Wentz’s involves hedge-hidden troubles: a variety of mental-illness diagnoses, a forced stint in boot camp and a medicine cabinet full of prescribed uppers and downers.

After time in several hardcore punk bands, Wentz formed Fall Out Boy—a fan suggested the name, which comes from a passing joke in an episode of The Simpsons—with singer-guitarist Patrick Stump, guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley. They put out their first album in 2003 (Wentz now calls it “embarrassing”) and followed it with Take This to Your Grave. Island Records noticed their underground following and, coincidentally, had a deal with the band’s label, Fueled By Ramen. Their two most recent albums, From Under the Cork Tree (2005) and Infinity on High (2007), have sold six million copies. While Fall Out Boy was recording its fifth album, playboy sent contributing editor Rob Tannenbaum to Wentz’s L.A. house for an interview.

Wentz has created his own suburban idyll in Beverly Hills. His wife, Ashlee Simpson, copiously pregnant in her second trimester, walked around the house doing arts-and-crafts projects with a friend to pass the time.

The first day we talked for five hours, sitting in matching armchairs overlooking the hills. When it was over Simpson said to her husband, “I don’t think I’d be able to talk to you for that long.” The next day we had another five-hour talk in the same spot. “You guys have to be best friends by now, right?” she asked me.

She also periodically texted him from the kitchen. “Let me see if I’m in trouble,” he said, checking for a message. Even though the couple try to keep their careers separate—“We don’t do too many interviews together,” he warned—Simpson gave up her crafts project long enough to talk about what she craves during pregnancy and why she made Wentz chase her so relentlessly.